IN PRACTICE - November 2004

Change: It’s an Inside Job!
The Transition from Training & Development
To Human Performance Solutions
by Bernadette Johnson

Change in the wind

Several years ago, changes in the financial services industry began to really affect my organization. As a not-for-profit organization, our philosophy differed from a for-profit organization, but running the business is the same: We both have assets, liabilities, capital, and equity. There were now other players in our field offering the same products. How would we compete? How could we hone the things we did very well and at the same time differentiate ourselves from other financial institutions?

The answer: getting better, while getting different. The organization began by identifying the strategic shifts we needed to make internally to thrive and to enhance our customer value. The organization was talking transformation…from transactional to relational…from being all things to all people to having a value proposition…from being reactionary and unfocused to being proactive and strategy focused…from leadership being a job position to being a mindset for everyone. Quite literally, we were transforming the culture.

We recognized we had to define our foundation, and everyone in the organization had their say. We identified our core purpose—the reason we exist. Our core values: how we will interact while running the business. Our vision: The organization acts as a lighthouse and builds longevity for our organization. Our vivid description: describing what we should be observing when we reach our vision. And lastly, we adopted the Balanced Scorecard to give focus and manage our valuable resources in achieving our strategy.

Getting better; getting different

In the midst of this transition, the training and development (T&D) department struggled with recognition and consequences. Transitions were new territory for our organization. If the organization was shifting, didn’t we need to shift as well? But we were good at training! But we were trained to train! But we made our reputation through training! But we had worked hard to create value for training in the organization!

In the book Good to Great, Jim Collins refers to taking a hard look at the brutal facts, with the belief that everyone will work through the circumstance and be successful. This is the philosophy the T&D department adopted.

The hard facts

Our mode at the time was that managers would ask for training no matter what the issue. We would accommodate—even though something didn’t quite feel right, even though the issue would “reappear” three months later. But we had nothing else to offer in its place. Our experience told us that training was the answer to a performance issue about 15 percent of the time. We were missing an opportunity to add value 85 percent of the time!

We were also in the midst of a branch project that used almost all of our resources. In our absence within the organization, “training” was happening anyway. Actually, it was more like information sharing. This presented a missed opportunity because we didn’t know what to ask to prioritize requests and how to use project planning effectively.

Most folks recognized that T&D typically was called into a project as an afterthought. Many times T&D was given the training request with a short turn-around period, which left us in a catch-up mode. We also realized that most of the projects were missing a holistic view while the optimum way people learned was missing from the projects’ scope.

We had to ask ourselves, what value were we bringing to the organization? More importantly, what value were we planning on bringing with this new strategy? We decided we wanted to be a value-added partner within the organization and set our sights on accomplishing this task.

First step in the journey

With the assistance of an outside consultant, we began to look externally to analyze what the organization needed to make the strategic shifts by having conversations with key managers. This would guide us in the direction we would need to take to become a value-added partner. The next step was to define what we needed to look like, so we developed our own strategic shifts that aligned with the organization shifts.

Our first realization was that we didn’t have internal agreement on who our customers were. We had always served individuals and departments. What would get us the greatest impact resource-wise, as well as greatest value to the organization? After a long and healthy discussion, we decided our primary customers were going to be the management team because they were responsible for implementing the organizational strategy. They were also responsible for the primary resources of time, money, and people.

Secondly, if our customers were responsible for implementing strategy and we knew that training was the solution about 15 percent of the time, how would we be able to serve them in a way that helped them to achieve the strategy? We needed to adopt a new methodology; we decided to adopt Human Performance Improvement (HPI). It gave a broader, more holistic examination of the environment and would enable us to see the cause and effect of issues and solutions.

In order to deliver this standard of service, our infrastructure needed to look different. In this realm, we had some resource constrictions. So the question became, How do we adopt the essence of performance improvement and build from there? Because we would need to interact differently with our customers as well as with each other to achieve the partnership we wanted to have, what competencies would we need to own and how would we build commitment to each other and the process? We would also need to adopt proven methodologies such as HPI and project planning to ensure consistencies in our processes and to enhance our quality of work.

All of these questions and more were answered over a year-long transition in which we developed our vision statement, team interaction agreement, and team norms; aligned products and services; and identified success criteria and metrics to measure what success looks like.

Lessons learned

We had to get better while getting different.
We got better by

• realizing that before we could change the way the organization thought of us, we had to change the way we thought of ourselves
• making our behavior match our mindset and intention
• learning and applying the identified competencies needed to serve our customers and the methodologies to enhance our processes.

We got different by

• learning to speak the language of our business in order to communicate with and understand our customer
• ensuring our strategies were directly aligned with and had a positive impact on organizational strategies
• being committed and being bold.

Update

Today, team members of the human performance solutions department serve on four out of five organizational strategic initiatives, which gives us a seat at the proverbial decision/impact “table.” It also gives us the opportunity to serve the organization in achieving the strategy from a holistic view.

We have also partnered with human resources and project management to deliver a readiness report that identifies the gaps that exist in achieving the strategy. We are presently performing the cause analysis of those gaps. By late fall, we will deliver the recommended solutions for closing the gaps. We continue to evolve in pace and are aligned with the organization as a valued strategic partner.

"Creating Space for Inspiration"
by Julie Becker on page 26
July 2009 issue
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